New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie delivers his State Of The State address Jan. 14 at the Statehouse in Trenton. / Julio Cortez, AP

by Rem Rieder, USA TODAY

by Rem Rieder, USA TODAY

When you make a serious mistake, when you really screw up, when something goes terribly wrong, admit it. Take responsibility for it. And apologize for it.

But when you apologize, do it quickly, and do it like you mean it. Some people are better at this than others. More on that later.

Bill Simmons, editor in chief of the ESPN-owned longform sports website Grantland, this week gave a clinic in how to take responsibility, fully, transparently and candidly. President Obama and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie should be taking notes.

The Grantland saga revolves around a story posted on Jan. 15 called "Dr. V's Magical Putter." The lengthy piece, written by Caleb Hannan, is about a distinctive putter that some golfers adore.

In doing his reporting, Hannan discovered that the inventor of this amazing golf club, a woman named Essay Anne Vanderbilt, had lied big-time about her credentials. He also discovered that Vanderbilt was a transgender woman. While Hannan was reporting the story, Vanderbilt committed suicide.

When the piece landed, it at first attracted positive reviews around the Internet. But, as Simmons notes in his apology, the mood soon shifted dramatically. Simmons writes: "The piece had been up for 56 solid hours before the backlash began. The narrative shifted abruptly, and by Friday night, early high-profile supporters were backtracking from their initial praise. Caleb started getting death threats. People came after us on social media."

Much of the criticism focused on the insensitivity of the piece, the lack of compassion toward Vanderbilt and a general lack of knowledge of what it means to be transgender. One line that stood out to many: Hannan wrote that "a chill ran down my spine" when he learned that Vanderbilt was transgender. Another low moment: Hannan outed Vanderbilt to one of her investors.

Simmons took readers inside Grantland to look at how the story came about, how it was edited, how decisions were made.

And he was unsparing both on his site and himself.

Simmons concludes that Grantland made a "massive mistake": "Someone familiar with the transgender community should have read Caleb's final draft. This never occurred to us. Nobody ever brought it up."

He goes on to say: "To my infinite regret, we never asked anyone knowledgeable enough about transgender issues to help us either (a) improve the piece, or (b) realize that we shouldn't run it. That's our mistake - and really, my mistake, since it's my site. So I want to apologize. I failed."

Finally, rather than blaming the author of the ill-fated article, Simmons wrote that in fact, Grantland had failed him. Part of the site's responsibility, according to Simmons, is to protect its writers from "coming off badly." He adds, "We didn't do that here. Seeing so many people direct their outrage at one of our writers, and not our website as a whole, was profoundly upsetting for us. Our writers don't post their stories themselves. It's a team effort. We all failed. And ultimately, I failed the most because it's my site and it was my call."

So, to sum up: Simmons took the fall, wholeheartedly owning up to the fiasco, without trying to defect blame.

Contrast that to Christie's marathon press conference after the revenge-fueled Fort Lee traffic disaster blew up on him. Christie, who had once joked about the tie-up, took responsibility for the episode and apologized. At the same time, he went out of his way to make clear that this one wasn't really on him. The problem lay with underlings, whom he quickly threw under the bus.

"I had no knowledge or involvement in this issue, in its planning or its execution," he said. It's "obvious," he went on, that he had been lied to by Bridget Anne Kelly, his deputy chief of staff, whom he promptly sacked.

No acknowledging that he had hired the people he was blaming. No dealing with what kind of culture would make such a thing possible. No notion of how he could be completely in the dark about such high-profile dirty tricks involving top aides.

No owning of the problem. In his State of the State address, Christie even used the classic, weaselly Washington cop-out made famous by one Richard M. Nixon during Watergate: embellishing it with a "clearly": "Mistakes were clearly made."

Team Obama could also profit from studying the forthright Grantland apologia. The president is not at his finest when it comes to conceding he was wrong.

Remember "If you like your health care plan, you will be able to keep your health care plan"? Long after it became obvious that that wouldn't always be the case under the Affordable Care Act, Obama and his apparatchiks clung to tortured parsing rather than conceding the obvious and moving on. The discredited declaration was named 2013's "Lie of the Year" by the fact-checking outfit PolitiFact.

The president ultimately said he was sorry, but only after a long, hard slog of obfuscation.

Which was too bad. A candid admission is not only the right thing to do. It's the smart thing to do.